Books: Here are three crime fiction tales that will delight

Waterloo Region Record

The Gods of Gotham, by Lindsay Faye (Putnam, 432 pages, $27.50 hardcover) — What would we expect to happen if a black-hooded serial killer was abducting children from the streets of New York and leaving their mutilated corpses in shallow graves? Why, someone would call the New York Police Department, of course, and let them bring the power of detective excellence and forensic science to the case.

But what if there was no NYPD?

That’s the situation in Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, which is set in New York, but way back in 1845 — well before the Civil War and just as the city was establishing its first public police service.

Gods is Faye’s second novel. Her first, Dust and Shadow, was a thrilling work, also set in history, specifically in London and pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper.

The mystery aspect of the new book is absolutely top-notch. Faye’s hero is Timothy Wilde, a luckless Irish immigrant who has been disfigured and impoverished by the great fire of 1845. His brother Valentine, a Democratic Party “fixer” and one in a huge cast of vivid supporting characters, gets Timothy a position on the fledgling police service, where the case of the child murders lands in his lap.

Wilde is flying by the seat of his pants, since his police “training” consisted of a short speech and being handed a copper star. But he pursues the case doggedly and with a growing awareness of his solid detective instincts.

Faye also navigates confidently through the political-historical labyrinth in which this already intriguing crime-and-detection story is taking place. The depictions of the growing young city are interesting and informative, dense without being unnecessarily didactic, giving us a real feel for the place and the time. And for anyone familiar with the city, there’s added enjoyment reading about the city when what is now midtown is nothing more than a farmer’s field. It’s like someone grafted a crime element into Edward Rutherfurd’s otherwise turgid historical novels.

In particular, Faye effectively uses a key plot point — all the young victims have cross-shaped mutilations carved into their torsos — to illustrate the seething ill will between the established English Protestants and the rapidly growing Irish Catholic classes.

The solution to the mystery is fair and will get more than a few readers to slap their foreheads with a muttered “Of course!”

The Gods of Gotham is more than just a good mystery and more than just a good period piece. It’s terrific at both, and easily the best book of the mystery genre so far this year.

Trust Your Eyes

by Linwood Barclay

(Doubleday Canada, 512 pages, $22 softcover)

This new Linwood Barclay novel is billed, very modestly in small type on the cover, as “a thriller.” It really doesn’t read like one, though.

Rather, Barclay (a former Toronto Star columnist) has produced a complex, multi-threaded crime story with an intriguing central relationship between an unlikely protagonist and his schizophrenic brother, one of the more unusual characters to come along in a while.

The core plot element measures a little high on the preposterometer, with several very low-probability events all overlapping perfectly. A murder, which just happens to tie into local politics, has taken place in New York, where it just happens to have been photographed by one of those cars that is mapping the planet for a website called Whirl360 (read: Google Street View).

The murder image just happens to be noticed by Thomas Kilbride, a schizophrenic obsessed with using Whirl360 to memorize the roads and street features of literally every city on earth. He thinks the CIA wants him to “store” the information for when all computer maps are destroyed by some yet-unknown calamity.

Thomas’ brother, Ray, is drawn into the case and begrudgingly goes to New York to check into the image, unwittingly getting involved in a high-stakes conspiracy involving senior political figures.

The story is not a mystery — we know all along what is happening. The fun comes from compulsively page-turning of a well-crafted yarn, and from rooting for Ray, a well-meaning schlemiel who gets way out of his depth but keeps plugging.

The story also has a secondary plot about a dark secret in Thomas’ background, which adds heft (the book runs nearly 500 pages) but not a whole bunch of interest. Barclay rounds out his cast with some useful side characters, including a former Olympic gymnast-turned-hired killer and a political Svengali.

There’s not enough action for this to “thrill” readers; everything simmers along without ever coming to a rolling boil. But simmering is often just the technique for a tasty stew, and that’s what Barclay has cooked up here.

The Black Box

by Michael Connelly

(Little Brown, 416 pages, $29.99 hardcover)

Reliable U.S. author Michael Connelly is back with the latest in the apparently inexhaustible supply of Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch detective stories.

In this one, Bosch has reopened a cold murder case from the Rodney King riots, in which a foreign female journalist was executed in an alley. As usual, Connelly puts together a first-rate procedural, as Bosch relentlessly pursues the case while angering his Los Angeles Police Department superiors with his insubordinate ways.

In some ways, Connelly (and Bosch) might be a victim of this series’ success.

Many readers surely enjoy the predictability of the Connelly/Bosch formula, but many will wonder if the formula — Harry catches a case, Harry refuses to obey orders to back off the case, Harry pursues the case, Harry foolishly goes after the bad guy without backup and narrowly avoids becoming a victim himself — is becoming an anesthetic rather than a treatment.

Make no mistake. This is still very high-quality crime-and-detective writing. It’s just starting to feel a little too familiar and predictable to be completely exciting.